This bi-weekly serves to inform and enlighten our minds on latest happenings in the sprawling countryside we call WordPress Land.
Release News
- WordPress 5.0’s pushed back release date was scheduled for tomorrow, November 27, but that is no longer happening. The first release candidate was dropped on Black Friday, which seems like something someone would do if they didn’t want to many people paying attention. Like releasing a damning climate change report on Black Friday because you don’t believe in science. But I digress… Anywho, the release candidate is out, but a new official release date has not yet been announced. A whole bunch of core contributors and former release leads have been making a very strong push to delay the release of WP 5.0 to January, citing concerns about the lengthy bug list. The release feels rushed and the same care that has been applied to major releases in the past is not being taken. Every time a new Gutenberg release drops, a great many plugins and themes built on Gutenberg break. A recent Gutenberg plugin release broke custom post types in installs with the classic editor plugin activated, which should make every agency that plans to just use the classic editor plugin for now very nervous. All in all it’s kind of a shit show right now.
- There’s going to be a hackathon at WordCamp US in Nashville on December 9th hosted by the WordPress accessibility team with the goal of building out automated accessibility testing within WordPress core. That’s pretty awesome and I’m looking forward to seeing that shape up.
- Gutenberg will be coming to WordPress mobile apps sometime early 2019 (February most likely). Which is weird if WP 5.0 ships prior to that…two disparate editing experiences. But I guess they are going to solve that with a pop up notification? Or maybe they could delay the 5.0 release and make these things match up… but that’s crazy talk!
Extending WordPress
- The popular NextGen Gallery Plugin is going to ship an update with Gutenberg support (in the form of a block for the editor) ahead of the WP 5.0 release. In the meantime, the CEO of Imagely (the folks behind NextGen) is also pushing to delay the release of 5.0.
- Block Lab is a new custom Gutenberg block creator. Although I guess everything Guten-related is new… I’m interested to compare how this will stack up against the new functionality coming to Advanced Custom Fields for block creation. I plan to do a thorough comparison once the dust settles and things are a bit more stable.
Grab Bag
- The upper limit of WordCamp ticket prices is going to climb to $25 in 2019 (up from $20). Just drink one less coffee that day. You’ve been meaning to cut back anyway.
- Figma, essentially the Google Docs of collaborative interface design, donated an organizational membership to the WordPress community. I’ve been hearing a lot of really great things about Figma and this makes me even more intrigued to check it out.
“It is the obligation of every person born in a safer room to open the door when someone in danger knocks.” -Dina Nayeri